Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII (10 page)

In the SOE’s signature way, without requiring any officer’s training whatsoever, Lassen was directly appointed a Second Lieutenant, the pips simply sewn onto his uniform. ‘They just gave the pips to me,’ Lassen explained laughingly, to one of his fellow raiders. To another, Tom Winter, who along with Hayes had seized the
Likomba
, he confided: ‘The greatest promotion I ever had before this was being made up to able seaman!’

*

Before his departure from Africa, Lassen had again gone up-country to help train the guerilla forces at Olokomeji – where the raiders had trialled their anchor-chain charges, prior
to the attack. There he’d fallen for a young and decidedly lissom African girl.

Lassen had just completed negotiations with her father to buy her for £10 and two bottles of gin, when he was recalled to London to receive his promotion. As he commented in his diary: ‘Unfortunately had to leave Africa when I was just completing negotiations to buy an exceedingly pretty wife … A great pity for that and other reasons I was recalled.”

One other comely maid was to be left behind by the raiders in West Africa – the
Maid Honour
herself. Stripped of her hidden weaponry, the ever-faithful Q Ship reverted to being a simple fishing trawler, and she was sold off for civilian use. She had served her purpose and had not been found wanting, and she would hold a special place in the hearts of the raiders long after the unit whose name she shared had ceased to exist – for the
Maid Honour
Force’s days were numbered.

Operation Postmaster had raised March-Phillipps’ stock to new heights, and his agent-commandos were moving on to bigger and better things.

Back in England, marriage seemed to be generally in the air, in spite of Lassen’s failure to bag his African bride. March-Phillipps – now promoted to Major – had met and fallen in love with Marjorie Stewart, a striking-looking actress who had signed up as an agent in the SOE. Barely two months after his return from Operation Postmaster, March-Phillipps married his lovely agent-bride. M attended the wedding, as did Appleyard, Hayes and Lassen, and most of the
Maid Honour
Force regulars.

A cascade of honours followed Op Postmaster’s success: a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for March-Phillipps; a Military Cross (MC) for Graham Hayes and a bar to Appleyard’s already existing Military Cross. The citations for these decorations talk euphemistically of being in ‘recognition of services while employed on secret operations.’ Anders Lassen was also written up for an honour, but it was yet to be bestowed upon him.

Churchill was known to be delighted at the raid’s outcome. A buccaneer at heart, he’d been the driving force behind Postmaster from the start – and the high stakes only seemed to quicken his appetite for such undertakings. While there was widespread dismay expressed by rival politicians and amongst the top brass at the ‘piratical’ and decidedly ‘un-British’ nature of the operation, Churchill was unrepentant.

As to the three ships seized in the iconic mission, the foremost prize, the
Duchessa d’Aosta
was sailed back to Britain with a Royal Navy prize crew aboard. She was re-named the
Empire Yukon
, and used as a troop transport until the end of the war. Together with her cargo, she was valued at some £300,000 for requisitioning purposes, a significant amount when considering that 23 Spitfires could then be built for such a sum. The two German ships were also renamed, and they remained at work in British West Africa until the war’s end.

The Italian prisoners seized during the raid were sent to South Africa, for interrogation, and to be kept well out of the public eye. Yet as late as January 1944, the powers that be were still considering mounting a second mission to Fernando Po, to
seize the Italian ship’s officers who had escaped capture. Whatever secrets the
Duchessa d’Aosta
had harboured, the British Government seemed determined to discover them in their entirety.

*

After March-Phillipps’ nuptials there was much work to be done. March-Phillipps –
Maid Honour
Force’s guru, master and commander – was older than most of his men, and he was also highly intelligent and idealistic in the sense that he would stop at almost nothing to further his ideals. In Anders Lassen he had found a very different individual, but each was drawn to the other irresistibly. Upon joining the SOE Lassen had been found too ill-disciplined to learn any drill, and too aggressive to perfect his spycraft, but by now March-Phillipps knew him to be perfect for ‘leading a boarding party,’ and for the kind of missions that he had in mind.

Together with Appleyard and Hayes – the calming, steadying influence to March-Phillip’s fiery vision – these men formed the corners of a immensely strong pyramid, and the base of a new unit that was to rise out of the ashes of the
Maid Honour
Force.
Maid Honour
was sacrificed on the altar of deniability: it was the unit that never was. In its place rose phoenix-like the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF). Equally secretive, the SSRF was the means by which March-Phillipps would realize stage two of his grand plan.

Using similar tactics to those they’d employed in Fernando Po, his men would strike fear and terror into the German enemy where they least expected it – on the French beaches from
where British forces had only months earlier fled before the might of the German blitzkrieg.

*

When Lassen had first signed up as a Special Duty volunteer, he had done so simply in the name ‘A. Lassen’. In reality, his full name was Anders Frederik Emil Victor Schau Lassen, and he hailed from a long line of Danish landed-gentry adventurers. Before the war his father was wont to visit London and summon their chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce from the steps of the Hyde Park Hotel with a blast of his hunting horn.

Throughout his unrivalled wartime career Lassen never once let on to his closest comrades about his highborn, moneyed background. All he ever wanted was to be known as ‘Andy’ and to be at one with the mixed band of fellow rebels and mavericks with whom he would wage war.

But all of that was to come. For now, the tiny unit that had become the SSRF was riding high on the success of the Fernando Po raid. A major recruitment drive ensued. One of the first new arrivals was Ian Warren, a British soldier ‘recruited’ into the force in Africa. During the
Maid Honour
’s stopover in West Africa March-Phillipps and Warren had got into a fight because Warren wouldn’t stop singing along to the smash wartime hit, ‘Stardust’, as he played it over and over again on the gramophone. March-Phillipps had ordered him to cease his crooning, or he’d throw him out of the mess window. In spite of being a few inches shorter than March-Phillipps, stocky Warren had squared up to the
Maid Honour
commander, and thrown him out of the window instead.

March-Phillipps had climbed back in and told Warren, with typical sporting good grace: ‘You bloody little man – you’d better come and join us!’

Warren would become one of Lassen’s roommates, a position not without its risks to life and limb. Warren would return from one bit of training or the other, only to find a knife quivering in the wooden doorframe inches from where he stood, or to hear the thud of an arrow embedding itself in the leg of his bed. It was an occupational hazard of sharing a room with the Dane, who was forever honing his skills with the blade, and testing the mettle of his fellow operators.

From the original force of a dozen agent-commandos, their number grew to approaching sixty. It included John Gwynne, recruited to join them as the operations planner, but known to all simply as ‘Killer’. Gwynne was a vegetarian and a teetotaler who shaved only in cold water, and he had an absolutely fanatical gleam in his eye.

Peter Kemp was another incurable war-seeker. He’d failed the British Army medical due to wounds he’d suffered while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. A mortar had exploded, injuring both his hands and shattering his jaw. But Kemp’s being ‘unfit for military service’ didn’t stop March-Phillipps from taking him, especially as he had such a wealth of frontline experience.

Another combat veteran was Sergeant Jack Nicholson, a Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) winner. Nicholson, a Scot, had soldiered with No. 7 Commando, the unit in which March-Phillipps and Appleyard had originally served, as they’d
suffered a series of defeats and were driven off the beaches of France.

For the majority of March-Phillipps’ men a return to mainland Europe – albeit temporary – was long overdue.

In order to prepare for the coming cross-Channel sorties, the SSRF was assigned a new base. Previously, they’d been operating out of the
Maid Honour
, anchored at a Poole dockside. The SSRF’s new headquarters was set in the fading grandeur of an SOE-requisitioned country house – Anderson Manor, lying on the banks of the Winterbourne River, in north Dorset.

Codenamed ‘Fyfield’ by the SOE, it was at Anderson that March-Phillipps forged his unit’s unique
esprit de corps
. At Fyfield he imbued his new recruits with the same contempt that he felt for the petty rules and regulations that so often plagued the wider military. Rank was subordinate to a soldier’s merit, and smartness and neatness of uniform – such that they wore – were secondary to a man’s ability to wage the kind of warfare that was coming.

In truth that warfare – isolated, without back up or support, often deep behind enemy lines – left little chance for long-term survival. As Lassen explained to some fellow Danish recruits: ‘I’ll make it quite clear you have less than a 50 per cent chance of coming through alive.’

In spite of such warnings, all sixteen prospective Danish recruits signed up to join the SOE agent-commandos. To better prepare the newbies for facing such daunting odds, March-Phillipps
had them train with detonators stuck in potatoes, which they hurled at each other; you either ducked out of the way, or you risked being blown up and hurt.

From Anderson Manor March-Phillipps, Appleyard, Hayes, Lassen, Warren, Gwynne, Kemp, Nicholson and several dozen others began training among the many estuaries and rivers of the Dorset coastline. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these rough-looking men dressed in a motley collection of British and foreign uniforms aroused enormous suspicion among the locals, especially when they were spotted canoeing up the rivers in the dead of night.

Lassen in particular, with his white-blond hair and foreign accent, was forever being seized by the Home Guard as a suspected German spy. After a phone call to the SOE’s headquarters he would be verified as one of Churchill’s Special Duty volunteers and released back to his unit.

In raiding the French coast March-Phillipps knew they would be going up against a far tougher enemy than those faced in Fernando Po. The German troops stationed in France had very likely fought across Europe. Accordingly, he devised a crash-training regime reminiscent of today’s SAS Selection. It involved forced marches of up to sixty miles in length, prolonged night navigation, unarmed combat, hand-to-hand fighting, marksmanship, as well as movement by water.

Teams were dropped in the remote Dorset countryside at night, and told to find their way back to Fyfield, with no money nor even any idea where they might be. It was during such epic marches that the city slickers among them first introduced their fellow recruits to Benzedrine, an amphetamine then
popular in London’s glitzier nightclubs and known colloquially as ‘bennies’.

With its euphoric stimulant effect, Benzedrine could keep an operator alert and clear-headed for long periods without any need to sleep.

There were the highly realistic simulated missions to penetrate an ‘enemy headquarters’, with hunter forces in pursuit and manning the supposed target. Throughout all of this Lassen’s skill as a born fighter was to the fore. Under the heading ‘Bow and Arrow Use in Modern Warfare’ he petitioned the War Office to be allowed to develop it as the ultimate silent killing weapon.

‘Having attended different training schools … I have no doubt that the bow and arrow would in many cases prove of great value,’ he wrote to the War Office. ‘I have considerable experience hunting with bow and arrow. I have shot everything from sparrows to stags, and although I have never attempted to shoot a man yet it is my opinion that the result would turn out just as well …’

He then listed its advantages:

1. The arrow is almost soundless.
   

2. The arrow kills without shock or pain, so it is unlikely that a man would scream or do anything like that.
   

3. A well-trained archer can shoot up to fifteen shots a minute.
   

4. The arrow is as deadly as an ordinary bullet.
   

In a typical fudge the War Office provided Lassen with two hunting bows complete with arrows, but not the permission
to use them against the enemy, for in the age of the machine gun and the flame thrower the humble bow-and-arrow was somehow viewed as being an ‘inhuman weapon’. That didn’t stop Lassen from training with his newly acquired weaponry around the Dorset woodlands and meadows, where villagers started to speak of him as ‘the Robin Hood Commando’.

By the summer of 1942 Anders Lassen was poised to justify his nickname.

The SSRF were about to launch Operation Dryad, their debut raid in Europe. They were allocated two Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs), one of which was designed to present a particularly low profile when powering through the sea, making her difficult to detect from land. An ‘experimental-type’ boat made by the shipbuilders Thorneycroft, she’d been nicknamed ‘Little Pisser’ by the men of the SSRF, due to the continuous bubbling noise made by her submerged – and therefore largely silent – exhausts.

Little Pisser – formally MTB 344 – would become indispensable on the coming missions. She was a hotted-up MTB of diminutive size that had been stripped of all weaponry, bar a pair of machine guns, to boost her speed to some thirty knots. She boasted twin Thorneycroft engines and as long as the weather remained relatively calm there was little could catch her on the open sea. She was skippered by Lieutenant Freddie Bourne who would become a stalwart of SSRF operations.

The plan for Operation Dryad involved an SSRF team crossing the Channel in Little Pisser, kidnapping the Germans garrisoning Les Casquets – one of the most northerly points of
the Channel Islands, and one of the German-occupied outposts closest to Britain – and leaving the place in total ruins. Les Casquets was used as a signal station for the German Navy, so this was a target of real strategic value.

The Channel Islands were the only part of the United Kingdom to have been taken by the Germans. They had been abandoned by British forces after the fall of France because they were seen as being indefensible. In range of the shore batteries stationed along the French coast, they could be pounded into oblivion and, after a raid by Heinkel bombers killed over forty islanders, they had surrendered in June 1940.

Les Casquets – a jagged line of humped rocks – forms part of a series of barren outcrops where an underwater sandstone ridge emerges from the waves. Blasted by the elements, they are devoid of vegetation. The name Les Casquets is thought to be a derivation of the French word ‘cascade’, alluding to the fierce tidal surges that swirl around the islands. The raiders’ chief interests were the lighthouse built upon the rock’s highest point, plus the all-important radio station and German garrison.

The sea around Les Casquets boasts a long and fearsome history of shipwrecks, making a successful approach challenge enough in itself. The raiders would only be in a position to scale the 90-foot rock and launch their attack once they’d navigated a series of treacherous shoals, through which the tidal race surges like the flushing of a giant toilet.

As with Fernando Po, March-Phillipps’ plan of attack called for striking under cover of darkness, absolute secrecy, shock and surprise. Key to the raid’s success was subduing the island’s
garrison before they were able to use their radio to call for help from the German forces sited on neighbouring islands.

Three attempts were made to execute the raid in July and August 1942, but each was foiled by a combination of bad weather and the unmanageable approach to the target. Yet such aborted runs weren’t entirely wasted. They enabled close recces of the target to be carried out, and for a scale model of it to be built at Anderson Manor so the raiders could better plan their attack.

By the time of the fourth attempt, March-Phillipps had scaled down his plans, utilizing a more nimble, manageable force. Instead of using two MTBs, only Little Pisser would go, carrying a force of twelve. Crucially, two of those would be German speakers – a Polish Jew called Abram ‘Orr’ Opoczynski, and Patrick Dudgeon, a Briton who had learned enough of the language to get by at school. As with Fernando Po’s ‘friendly Spaniards’, they would be placed in the vanguard, to shout confusing orders in German and confound the rocky outpost’s defenders.

The morning of the raid – 2 September 1942 – dawned bright and clear. As March-Phillipps and his cohorts gathered around the scale model of Les Casquets for one final planning session, the decision was made not to go in on one of the three easier landing points – small rocky beaches formed at the base of the rocks. It stood to reason that those could be mined, or sentries set guarding their approach.

Instead, they would go for the most difficult landing, putting ashore at the base of a sheer, 80-foot rock face immediately beneath the lighthouse itself, with a view to scaling that and
attacking with ultimate stealth and surprise. Laden down with weaponry – each would carry a Tommy Gun plus half-a-dozen magazines of ammo, Mills bombs, charges to blow their targets, plus the indispensable Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife – it was going to be some climb.

After a day thick with nerves the men ate a last meal and dressed for the coming mission. Each wore dark combats, a black balaclava and silent, felt-soled boots, while any exposed skin was given the obligatory ‘blackening-up’ using British Army camo cream. Just before dusk the army lorry set out from Anderson Manor, the raiders singing softly to themselves as it bumped along the Dorset lanes and they psyched themselves up for what was coming.

At Portland Harbour, lying just off the coast at Weymouth, Freddie Bourne was ready and waiting with Little Pisser. Under the cloak of darkness Bourne powered up the low-lying MTB and set a course for the Channel Islands. Bar March-Phillipps and Appleyard, who remained with Bourne on the bridge, all the raiders went below decks. Like most MTBs Little Pisser had a habit of smashing her way through the waves like a battering ram, lurching from one to the next with bone-shaking impacts, plus the noise from her twin engines was as if a Spitfire was taking off to either side of her hull.

She was showing no lights, and the men made the best of the journey they could, getting their eyesight adjusted to the darkness in readiness for the assault.

At 2245 the faint silhouette of Les Casquets – a sea-serpent’s humped back rearing out of the night-dark waters – came into view, with the knife-thin form of the lighthouse stabbing above
it. With Appleyard helping navigate, Bourne steered the MTB as close as he could to the northern side of the rocks, where the raiders would attempt to make their ascent.

As she made her final approach, Little Pisser was switched to silent-operation mode. In addition to her powerful twin Thorneycroft engines, she was fitted with a more sedate, auxiliary Ford V8, for sneaking in close to enemy targets. She puttered in quietly to within 800 yards of the rocks and dropped anchor; it was now all up to March-Phillipps and his crew.

For tonight’s operation the chosen close assault craft was a Goatley, a collapsible, wooden-bottomed rowing-boat-cum-canoe with canvas sides. Some 1,000 Goatleys would be ordered by the War Office by the war’s end, but at this stage in proceedings their use was restricted largely to unconventional raiding forces.

March-Phillipps gave the order for the off. Appleyard knelt in the prow, signalling directions to left and right, as the four men on either side paddled for all they were worth. A powerful current was trying to force the craft north-eastwards, threatening to sweep them past the eastern edge of the rocks and into the open sea. With the Goatley’s canvas prow set into the teeth of the tide, backs bent to their task, sweat pouring down blackened faces despite the cool of the night.

Some fifteen minutes later the low-lying craft crept into the lee of the dark, uninviting island. Appleyard had detected a slab-sided, sloping rock lying directly below the engine house tower that he figured they might just use as a makeshift landing-platform. With the crashing of the sea masking the noise of their approach, the Goatley was brought in as close as he dared,
lest her flimsy sides be dashed against the cliff and holed. The kedge anchor – a light anchor used to help a craft manoeuvre in narrow, treacherous spaces – was released. The Goatley was now fixed at the stern.

Appleyard took a line from the bows and prepared to make the jump. Timing it to perfection, he leapt across to the slimy, seaweed encrusted rock, and made the bowline fast. The Goatley was now secured in place from both ends, which made it slightly easier for the remainder of the heavily-laden raiders to follow him.

Graham Hayes – the hero of the cutting-out of the
Likomba
– plus one other remained in the Goatley, to safeguard her both from the sea and rocks, and from enemy discovery. The ten remaining men scrambled across to their slippery landing and onto enemy territory.

The night was clear and star-bright, with just the faintest sliver of a moon. The men surveyed the route ahead. The first half of the rock face was stained almost black from the constant pounding of the sea. Above that, the humped folds of sandstone took on a greyer hue, with here and there a slash of brighter yellow reflected in the moonlight, showing where stubborn lichens clung to cracks and crevices.

Ten men hauled themselves up the rock face, the noise of their climb being inaudible among the heavy booming of the sea in the chasms and gulleys. Fortunately, the cliff offered plenty of generous – if at first slimy – handholds. As they neared the top the raiders hit their first obstacle – coils of barbed wire, forming a defensive perimeter. With his body hugging the earth to keep well hidden, the lead man cut through the wire,
the roaring of the surf below drowning out the sharp clips of his snipping.

With muscles burning from the long paddle across the sea, plus the climb under heavy loads, it was now that the rigours of their Dorset training really stood the raiders in good stead. No sentries were visible, but the base of the lighthouse tower was a mass of barbed-wire entanglements, concrete bunkers and blockhouses, with a shoulder-high wall encircling the lot. A 20mm Oerlikon cannon was positioned against one wall, which could put down devastating fire onto the raiders.